#bradburychallenge

[authorofdreams]

Sunday Sharing 2020/09/20

Today is the the Sunday after the Elevation of the Holy Cross and the feast day of Greatmartyr Eustathius Placidas, with his wife and children, of Rome. Today’s Epistle is Galatians (2:16–20) Today’s Gospel is The the Holy Gospel according to St. Mark (8:34–9:1) D4: Source code for mortals Unlike Ken Thompson, I like to see the state of the file I’m editing. His not worrying about seeing the state as well as the cryptic commands for ed lead George Coulouris to write em or, editors for mortals, whose source is on the net. D6: Cultures need one truth Perhaps a search for objective truth is a fool’s errand, but if we abandon it we can only get along with people who have the same subjective truth as us. D8: I need lots of essay collection Where your goal is to read one essay per day most collections last a month or two at best. In looking for new ones I came across this list. D12: We have lost a great with the death of Stanley Crouch There are a lot of articles on the great jazz critic, although it seems reductionist to call him that. He was so much more. If you are unfamiliar with Crouch’s writing, get out there and read. D20: Mass extinction is more common than you think It looks like the Triassic was a very volatile period, begging with largest mass extinction and ending with another. Now we find one in the middle. I wonder if the period will be divided in two. Book of the Week Ghost stories are an interesting genre. One of the two creators was M. R. James. Read the full article

[survivalistriumphenough]

So a new writer friend of mine has a slack group and they focus on flash fiction. I have never really written any flash fiction myself but thought I would like to give it a try. He gives everyone three words and a self imposed time limit of 24 hours with which to write a 350 word or less piece of flash fiction. Today’s words were: Squeak, Bottle, & Treehouse. I have no idea how I did. I have no idea about the structure of flash fiction. I did enjoy this enough, though, to want to learn more about it. It is a nice break from the short stories for the Bradbury challenge and the novel I’m currently working on. Flash Fiction: Entry 03.05.18 The first time my uncle told me I was pretty I was eleven and it was also the last thing he ever said. He had climbed up into the treehouse where I went anytime him and daddy got to drinking. Mama was gone for almost a year by then, buried in the hard red clay on our property, a plain uninscribed stonemason’s cross her marker. I could see it from there. I used to watch him and daddy shoot bottles off it and small chips were taken from it where they had missed. I could always hear him coming, the soft squeak of an ill-fitted prosthetic he wore on his left leg with worn black elastic straps; his leg had been taken by diabetes along with one eye. He was deaf to the sound the way we all are when there is something we do not want to register. Before he touched me that night he told me that it wasn’t the one made for him; that he had taken one that was meant for a movie star or country western singer, someone more important to society than he was and it made him feel big, like he got one over on the whole world and every son of a bitch in it. He moved like a mechanic, which is just what he was, and his hand, when it pushed the hair away from my eyes, pressed hard like he was working with steel or iron and he smelled like gear oil and English Leather. To this day I can stand neither. To this day I need a soft hand. That night I had been watching the birds, startled, taking wing, and wheeling high overhead as if warring with each other for some brief supremacy of the coming night; the stars blinking into existence like frosted tips of rough water in an archipelago of clouds in the frame of a sky bruised by sunset. Later, afterwards, when he tried to climb down one of the straps broke and so did his neck. I did not cry at his funeral.

[bradburychallenge]

An essay, a poem, a short story : Day 1

Essay : What we talk about when we talk about translation by Deborah Smith

Poem : The more loving one by W H Auden

Story : the Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury

[bradburychallenge2017-blog]

Wk 4: The Last True Confessions of Elwood Peace

There is the title of week 4′s short story. The story of a man on death row who has acquiesced to a request by the local church to hear his final confession on the condition that there is also a journalist, a specific journalist, there to tell his story. Why now, after all these years, would he finally agree to tell his story?

It is the night of his execution and he tells the story of his daddy, a  cold blooded and ruthless man, and also of his own raising. It beings in the early twentieth  century in the deep south and spans two decades and four states. Life, as a child, on the run from the law and how he turned to a life of murder himself. Finally all what brought him from the deep south to the frigid north and to his execution.

[ecgarrison]

Attempting the Ray Bradbury Challenge #BradburyChallenge like @KatFrench

Attempting the Ray Bradbury Challenge #BradburyChallenge like @KatFrench

Photo by Alan Light

“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” – Ray Bradbury

So, my author friend Katina French is doing the “Ray Bradbury Challenge”, that is, to write a story a week, for a year. I am a shameless fangirl of her writing, so naturally I very much approve of this plan.

As for me, I have needed some motivation to get back in a…

[permissionaccepted]

from Words Without Borders, this is me (Kenneth) reading a particularly powerful passage.

[authorofdreams]

Atonement and Forgiveness

It had the potential to turn into a show trial, and his publicist — correctly, I thought — refused to put the designer through that. Galliano’s trial should be over. Now it’s time for him to get out the scissors. And ribbons.Ingrid Sischy on the designer John Galliano Yesterday I made a mistake in my Bradbury Reading. The normal scheduled reading was “The Choice of Amyntas” by Somerset Maugham, but read the story after it in my Maugham collection, Daisy, by accident . I also skipped the next essay in Nothing is Lost, the collection of Ingrid Sischy essays I have been reading. That was intentional. Today is a day of driving twelve hours. I pre-select shorter pieces to read when that happens. The mistake is fortuitous. Both the story and the essay deal with individuals paying the price for their sins. Both focus a good deal on forgiveness, but forgiven and denied, and in the essay, atonement. Errors, mistakes, sins, and all the other forms of misdeeds seem to rule the news these days. That is no surprise. There is not only the obvious reason of “if it bleeds it leads”. Negative self-talk about themselves dominates many people’s thoughts. Most of us enjoy negative open talk about others. After all, I started this post calling my reading a mistake. It is the mistake that would have disrupted the entire Bradbury Challenge reading in the past. I have started the reading portion, to read a story, poem, and essay a day for a 1000 days more than once. Read the full article

[authorofdreams]

Sunday Sharing 2020-09-06

Today is the Thirteenth Sunday of Pentecost & The Thirteenth Sunday of Matthew. We celebrate the holy martyrs Eudoxios, Zeno, and Makarios at Melitene in Armenia Today’s Epistle is the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians(16:13–24) Today’s Gospel is The the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew. (21:33–42) D4: Pirates of the Pancreas As a type II diabetic, life can suck. I cannot imagine how it is for kids, who are mostly type I. Maybe they won’t have to learn those habits in a few years. D6: Fish hounds is my new name for otters One of the essays I’ve read for the Bradbury challenge looked at animal rights through a lens of animals and humans as partners. I think in the industrial world we too easily forget that domestic animals arose often not as food, but as partners in finding and saving food. D8: The best thing to happen to GURPS was Dungeon Fantasy Dungeon Fantasy is a great example of using GURPS as a toolkit. It uses templates to build something similar to classes and cuts down the options, on both sides of the screen, to optimize the game for genre. SJ Games has done similar work for action as a genre and monster hunting. That’s great if they cover something you wanted, but what if you want to build something else. Psi-Wars is a worked example of creating such a framework for your specific campaign idea. D12: He was promoted to Admiral, not General I think there are good reasons for the new Space Force to use Naval ranks. Read the full article

[authorofdreams]

Sunday Sharing 2020/08/30

Today is the Twelfth Sunday of Pentacost & The Twelfth Sunday of Matthew. We celebrate the Leaving-Taking of the Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist. Today’s Epistle is First Corinthians (15:1–11 Today’s Gospel is The the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew. (19:16–26) D4: D&D Tweet of the Week Talk about too true for comfort. D6: Great men are humble It is sad when anyone dies at 43. Lots of people will remember Chadwich Boseman for Black Panther, but this story…this is how I want to remember him. Did you know he visited kids with cancer? Neither did I, because he wasn’t making sure you knew it. He did it because he had a big heart. And when he learned how much those visits meant to those kids did it swell his ego. No, it humbled him. D8: Woodworkers of St. Francis I am tempted to do this, but I’m afraid George would treat it as a lunch table…and I don’t mean the nuts. D12: Get on my driveway I admit, I wish there were young kids in my neighborhood running down four consecutive lawns playing football in the fall. I’d rather that than the quiet we have. D20: Forget hexes, got octogons I think these are pretty interesting. I’d like to do something like Slumbering Ursine Dunes in the campaign for my nephew. I’m going to try this. Book of the Week The cover from my 70s copy. My current daily short story for the Bradbury Challenge comes from The Menace from Earth, although I’m halfway through it. Read the full article

[survivalistriumphenough]

Just the first couple pages of the first draft, unedited and raw, of this weeks short story....

The Ballad of Assumption Parrish

By Hetch Litman

even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering -Cormac McCarthy

One

Summer 1971, Belle Rose Quarter, Louisiana

Detective Sargent Paul Worthwhile eased his unmarked Ford Granada to the curb outside the clean row of plantation style bungalows in Belle Rose Quarter; the cocaine had him seeing ghosts, like disintegrating prophecies, in the shadows between the buildings with each revolution of blue and red siren light from the three black and whites that had pulled up on the grass, lighting the wet ground in colors better served in a store window on Christmas than a murder scene. The night was his, though, he felt at home in it, and for a just a moment he breathed it all in, the chaos and the night itself; the smell of a death — exhaust, wisteria, and coroner’s chemicals. He shifted the car into park, reached into his inside coat pocket and produced a soft pack of Pall Mall straights. He took the last one out, lit it, blew smoke out of the window and watched it linger and spiral there in the humid air that pressed on everything below, keeping the whole of the city crushed and sweating. He crumpled the pack in his hand and tossed it onto the floorboard. The radio crackled and the dispatcher, Shirley he thought her name was, a tall ice queen looking blond with big breasts, said something about an eleven five fifty. “You are goddamned right, Shirley,” he said to car’s empty interior, “and I’d share some with you if only you’d have me.” He unwrapped his rosary from the rear view, all small blue beads on silver, and used the crucifix to scoop a hit of cocaine out of a small magazine-paper bindle, snorted three times once from each of Christ’s nailed hands and last from his thorn crowned head, sunk back, sniffing hard and waiting for the drips. Then it came on and he was fresh and clean again. He shut off the car, pushed his long legs out onto the street and made his way toward the open doorway where a uniform stood, just inside, the badge on his chest and eagle on his hat, the only things visible, glowed like soft gold lighted by the overhead porch light. “We got a gasper here.” The officer was too small, even his voice was small; a kid playing dress up. They just kept getting younger every year that passed. Pretty soon, he thought, they’d be hiring junior high school kids to fill out the rosters. This was the Belle Rose not some god damned day care. “What flavor?” he asked through a mouthful of Pall Mall smoke. He pushed his way past him not really waiting for an answer but expecting one none the less, planted his worn brown leather shoe on what was left of the carpet on the battered landing, looked up the narrow, darkened staircase that led inextricably upwards, and let his eyes adjust to the low light. He breathed in deep and smelled work. “I haven’t been upstairs yet but the word is some J-Cat asphyxiated himself while trying to get off. Charlie Boyle from Third Precinct come down about a half hour ago and told me that. Open and shut he said.” A J-Cat was a wacko, a mentally disturbed individual that when he got clamped up he went to the J-Ward in county, for psych treatment. Stone cold 5150. Worthwhile shook his head and pushed forward up the stairs, and into the darkness beyond, leaving the kid in the past. The door was at the end of a long hall, the place having been built shotgun style, narrow in width but pushing far back onto the property, it was open and the light coming from inside the room, raw and bright, lit the aged and torn paisley print wallpaper. Either the kid had some medical condition that required fluorescents or the blood crew was here. He entered past another uniform standing outside the door, smoking. Mulcahey, the precincts blood guy, a creeping Jesus Roman Catholic looked up from where he was bent over next to the body. Mulcahey held a pen and clipboard in his left hand and with his right gestured toward the body. “Hey Worthy. This here was Jay Graham, 23. Lived here 3 years. Never once late on rent. Worked nights at the bookstore on Clanmore.” Worthwhile grunted. The bookstore was an adult deal, girls grinding behind quarter inch glass, smut flicks, and books; a sex trade spot for the low and depraved. “C.O.D?” “Standard AEA. “Auto Erotic Asphyxiation. Hypoxyphilic fatality. Compression of the carotid arteries with ligature.” He pointed to first one side of his neck and then the other, almost absently, below each ear. “Transvestic fetishism. You know how the practice started?” “I don’t but I’m sure you’re going to tell me, Francis.” Mulcahy hated being called Francis, “you got a smoke?” He looked at what was offered and it wasn’t Pall Mall, hell it wasn’t even a straight so he waved it off. “Well, it really is fascinating, Detective.” Mulcahey pressed the last word between his tongue and palette as if he were trying to break it. “Back in a more moral day when hanging was the preferred manner of disposing of general pieces of shit, some people noticed that men being hung were ejaculating while they were swinging.” “That’s fascinating.” He said, uninterested, but if Mulcahey noticed he didn’t let it slow him down. “He’d still be alive it weren’t for the rope jumping the track and getting stuck in the track behind the rollers.” He pointed into the room beyond with his pen. Worthwhile looked but could not see past him. He assumed it was a gesture toward the closet. “I’m sure the parents are going to label it a suicide,” Mulcahey continued, “to avoid the shame. Quite frankly that is just where this whole shit show gets interesting. You know who’s son this is?“ He waited a beat sighting down on Worthwhile like a killer, he thought, ready to pull a trigger and then waited a moment longer. “It’s Fine’s Kid.” “You’re shitting me.” “Just let me know when you’re ready to bag and tag.” Worthwhile looked behind him, down the dark hallway that seemed to suddenly constrict his life into a singular dark moment that he wanted no part of, and walked through the open bedroom door to see the body of the Mayor’s son.

[survivalistriumphenough]

Cover for the short stories I’m working on for CampNaNoWriMo next month.

[survivalistriumphenough]

There, That Violent Country: A six sentence story

My daddy, Jacob Castellaw, a man known far off the mountain for no small peculiar rectitude, was drunk when he set fire to those children after baptizing each of them in the blood of the lamb; baptizing them in corn white, old pig’s blood, and, finally, cleansing flame. I’ve heard it said paternity informs the child, the DNA a drip line filled with explosives, a drip line that all these years later put these matches in my hand. The recklessness of age had made my daddy weak to certain savage desires that I too carry in my blood – molecular keys that can fit only a single locked box that holds in it’s dark interior the broken, buzzing wires of its own bright apocalypse. It’s dusk on the mountain and woven behind the small clapboard Church of the Old Regular Baptists the moon illuminates the tips of clouds and serpentine smoke from the cook-fires further on down approaching the town, beyond the river’s edge where the charcoal of the ridge line presses toward the sky. Mama had said that when he lit that matchbook the cancer had already eaten him up; been eating up his brain and his pancreas, a cancer malignant and pervasive, and bearing real weight, had sunk its crooked fingers deep. Now I light my own match — knowing what I know of there, that violent country — and looking over their sleeping faces crowned in firelight I let it fall, the flame itself a simple election by grace

[survivalistriumphenough]

Starting this class today. Let’s hope it can help me out with writing these short stories for the Bradbury Challenge!

[survivalistriumphenough]

Just finished this weeks short story. Entitled Balefire. A priest looks back on the murders he committed decades before on the night of the papal conclave. It comes in at just over 3000 words. I’m happy with it.

I am always overwriting so this week I wanted to see i I could keep it to 3000 words. I packed a lot of information into it. Mayhaps too much information but it is clear prose and the sentences from what I can see are concise and that makes me happy.

As with all my weekly stories it’s only a first draft with a single pass over for glaring issues. So, off now it goes into the Bradbury Challenge First Draft folder. Hopefully, I’ll be able to revisit these for use in a book of short stories sometime early next year.

[ingo-hampe]

#bradburychallenge Wenn ich jemanden erzähle: Ich bin Autor, werde ich oft gefragt: Und? Was schreibst du so? Ich mag diese Frage. Sie gibt mir die Gelegenheit, meine Idee zu pitchen. So kann ich die Idee testen und spiele dabei mit geringem Einsatz. 🌐 When I say I am a writer I have been asked very offen: Realy? And what are you writing? I love this questions. They give me the opportunity to pitch the idea. I can test the idea and play my cards at a low stack. Right now I am writing the script for a scifi audioplay. Humans aren't very popular in this world. A spaceship is entered by pirates and the high developed beings have to work with the humans to survive. The picture ja by the game Ascendency by the LogicFactory. One of my da favourite games of all Times. #cw #amwriting #writerslife #pitch #scifiartwork #schreiben #autorenleben #enjoylife #enjoyyourself (at Rote Insel, Schöneberg)

[ingo-hampe]

#bradburychallenge Ich habe eine Schublade voller unvollendeter Geschichten. Letzte Woche schlüpfte einer dieser Geschichten und wollte, dass ich mich wieder mit ihr beschäftige. Wenn ich ohne Termindruck schreibe, besteht die Möglichkeit, dass die Geschichten unvollendet bleiben. Wenn sie mich aber wieder packen, weiß ich, das sie richtig gut sind. 🌐 I have y drawer full of unfinished storries. Sometimes ins of them slips out and asks for my attention. When I write without a deadline it is likely that the storries remain unfinished. But if they grab me again I know that they are really worth writing. #amwriting #writerslife #schreiben #autorenleben #enjoylife #enjoyyourself